#code smells

Curious about healthier, cleaner code? 

Dive into this fantastic read on Code Smells — those subtle signs that your code might need a refactor before bigger problems show up. 

From duplicated logic to overly long methods, understanding code smells helps teams improve maintainability, readability, and overall software quality. 

If you're going to make an adventure game in SCI Companion (or gods forbid SCI Studio) there are certain things that you might want to look out for. Missing them may make your game look somewhat lazy to those who know what to look for.

SCI0

"Colors" setting: since the template is based on Leisure Suit Larry 3, it inherited the option to specify any combination of 16 window background and text colors.

MT-32 patch: easily missed depending on what you're testing with, early SCI0 fangames mightn't have had any MT-32 testing done at all. Thus you might miss that the MT-32 patches are straight from Larry 3 (again), including the startup messages, and your background music may not sound as good as one might hope, with mismatched instruments.

BriPro logo: instead of the Sierra mountain logo, the first character in three out of five included fonts is the letters BP, for Brian Provinciano.

Template Guy: as I like to call him. The dude with the blue shirt and gray pants. He's the default player character.

You might consider all that to be in the past, considering it literally is, but there's still projects actively in development that target SCI0/01.

SCI11

Blueish grays: since this template is based on Space Quest 5, the original version used to have SQ5's palette as opposed to, say, the default SCI palette. The later template, before I even all but took over the project, had this replaced.

Template Guy: he's back, and I myself specifically made him so you wouldn't be stuck with Roger Wilco. Same things apply as in SCI0 though.

The font: by default, the SCI11 template comes with three common fonts and one specific to SQ5, and uses this as the default. It has no distinction between upper and lower case.

Status line: even to this day, the template game includes SQ5's custom-drawn status line, with the raised border.

Inefficient polygons: a bit technical, might have to go into detail in another post, but early versions of SCI Companion used a rather hackish way to import external polygon data (where can you go, like in my pathfinder woes) which ate a lot of memory for no good reason. Later versions allow you to use the &getpoly command that I added, a bit of syntactic sugar that imports the polygon data in such a way you can't tell it apart from Sierra's code.

There's no BriPro logo in the SCI11 template's fonts, it's the Sierra logo, but on the other hand only Leisure Suit Larry 6 has a menu bar despite being an SCI11 game, so you'd rarely if ever get to see it. The MT-32 patch is Sierra's own near-GM patch, and includes a "SIERRA ON-LINE" message.

Originally coined by Kent Beck, according to Martin Fowler “a code smell is a surface indication that usually corresponds to a deeper problem in the system”. The idea of code smells is they are patterns or anti-patterns that are easy to identify and show the code needs to be reviewed in that area when refactoring your code.

Research by Tufano et al. found that there is empirical evidence…

Originally coined by Kent Beck, according to Martin Fowler “a code smell is a surface indication that usually corresponds to a deeper problem in the system”. They are patterns in code that are quick and easy to spot. Even junior developers and those learning to code can smell bad code.

“You don’t have to be a five star chef to smell that the meat has spoiled.”

From a pragmatic standpoint…

Topics

References

Mutable vs Immutable objects

Mutable objects (Arrays, Strings) are changed in memory

Immutable objects (Fixnums, Symbols) cannot be changed in memory, but the pointer for a variable will change the shovel operator << will mutate a mutable object, whereas the assignment operator = will simply create a new pointer, and will not mutate the original object

Array/Hash Defaults

Scope

Refactoring and Code Smells

Atom Cheatsheet

Projects

Memory Puzzle

Partner: Joseph Bui

Card game where you flip two cards over at a time, and try to find matching pairs.

Challenges

Keeping your train of thought clear/linear

Debugging

Learnings / Reminders

Refactor immediately, don’t put it off!

It will help with debugging, and maintaining cleaner code

As soon as you start having to comment your code, put that code block into a method

Can name methods by the object that they return, then can call the method as if it’s a variable (because of Ruby’s flexible syntax)

Because Hashes include methods from the Enumerable class, you can call Hash::find {|key, val| conditional_filter } to filter a Hash for either keys or values

Remember quick keys for Atom & Bash

When writing long blocks of boolean code (___ && ___ && ___) you can split it up into separate lines if you add a new line after the &&:

___ &&

___ && ___`

Remember how to write/use Syntactic Sugar:

def [](pos) \n x, y = pos \n grid[x][y] \n end